ProLiant reliant on Emulex

Emulex Corporation has announced the availability of a broad range of I/O connectivity solutions for the new HP ProLiant Gen8 servers, based on the new Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2600 v2 product family. This next wave of HP ProLiant Gen8 innovations is designed to accelerate performance of virtualised environments and deliver the intelligence necessary to optimise data centre effectiveness. Connectivity solutions provided by Emulex include modular LAN on Motherboards (referred to as HP FlexibleLOMs), Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and iSCSI Converged Network Adapters (CNAs), 10Gb Ethernet (10GbE) Network Interface Cards (NICs), and 8 and 16Gb Fibre Channel (16GFC) Host Bus Adapters (HBAs).

"We're enabling a convergence-ready infrastructure with market-leading, integrated 10GbE, FCoE and Fibre Channel connectivity solutions for the new HP ProLiant Gen8 blade and rack server platforms," said Shaun Walsh, senior vice president of marketing and corporate development, Emulex. "With the broadest range of I/O connectivity support for the HP Converged Infrastructure, customers can leverage the Emulex common driver stack and management application for physical and virtual networking solutions, including HP FlexFabric and HP Flex10 and HP Virtual Connect."

Key features of the Emulex I/O connectivity solutions for HP ProLiant Gen8 servers include:
· Industry Leading Protocol Offload Performance: Emulex vEngine™ technology offers full FCoE, iSCSI and TCP/IP offload, including TCP Offload Engine (TOE), to provide optimum server efficiency and higher virtualisation ratios.
· Superior Gen 5 Fibre Channel Connectivity: Emulex LightPulse® Gen 5 FC (16GFC) HBAs deliver more than 1.2 million I/O operations per second (IOPS) on a single port, the highest level of Fibre Channel adapter performance available today. Emulex Gen 5 FC HBAs also deliver up to 10x better reliability than competing HBAs with a cool running ASIC and fail-proof passive heat sink for heat management within the server, rather than utilising a fan.
· Increased I/O Bandwidth with PCI Express (PCIe) 3.0 Support: Emulex LightPulse Gen 5 FC HBAs for HP ProLiant servers support PCIe 3.0, which provides a faster I/O bus, more PCIe lanes and increased I/O bandwidth and delivers optimal performance for applications – such as virtualisation and database management systems – by matching the performance capabilities of HP ProLiant Gen8 servers based on the new Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 v2 product family.
· Network Convergence: Based on IEEE standards and an enterprise-hardened Fibre Channel stack, Emulex FCoE supports storage and network traffic on converged infrastructure. FCoE can help customers save up to 30% on adapters and switches, 80% on cables and 40% on power and cooling, and is fully compatible with existing Fibre Channel storage and switches.
· Centralised Management: With a single driver model, HP FlexFabric and Flex-10 adapters can be controlled, configured and managed from a single console using Emulex OneCommand™ Manager. This enables enterprise scalability with time-saving features that provide more than twice the adapter management functionality and take half the time to install and manage compared to other I/O solutions. Emulex OneCommand® Manager plug-in for VMware vCenter™ Serverallows users to manage Emulex adapters across hundreds of servers natively from the VMware vCenter Server console.
· HP support for Emulex adapters spans across generations and protocols. Utilising FCoE and iSCSI CNAs, Network Interface Cards (NICs), Fibre Channel HBAs and FlexibleLOMs provided by Emulex in HP data centre environments, customers can leverage a common driver stack and management tools.